Emarsys Spring 22 Release – Making Segments from Email Engagement Reporting

This week saw the Emarsys 2022 Spring Release.

If you haven’t already, I suggest you read this release blog for a top-level overview and then dive in to the Product Updates page for all the details.

Here I’m going to look in detail at one great new feature – Engagement Reporting.

This is a new screen in the Email Analytics page:

The Engagement Reporting screen

It breaks down the responses to your email campaign into lifecycle stages, based on the past response history of the contacts in your launch list.

Why do I want this?

In our experience, poor responses to an email campaign are almost always down to the quality of the contact list, not the email content. This screen lets you check quickly if your launch list contained too many contacts who were never really going to engage anyway.

You can then weed these non-responders out of your more important campaigns and keep your response rate – and thereby your sender reputation – high.

Pretty neat. So what do I do with this information?

Well, each of these cohorts tells you something different.

So you need to devise the right strategy for each one – choose different channels, different incentives, a different frequency of messages – keep experimenting until you find what works and build on that. I have included some suggestions below.

So how can I send to these cohorts individually?

That’s what I’m going to show you here!

We do plan to make each of these reports available to save as a contact list with one click, but until then here are simple instructions on how to create segments that will represent these lifecycle stages.

1. Active contacts

Here you simply want any response to an email in the last 3 months (for example):

Segmenting for active contacts

Since these are your most engaged customers, their responses are an accurate reflection of the value of your email and its contents. If this is below average, then look at ways to improve your content.

2. Inactive contacts

Here you want contacts who have responded in the past, but not for a while. So we combine two criteria with the AND operator:

Segmenting for inactive contacts

If this is above 1% you might want to keep sending to these contacts. Otherwise consider excluding them periorically from these kinds of send as they can only hurt your performance in the long run.

3. Long-term inactive customers

As with inactive contacts, we are looking for people who did respond at least once, but not for a much longer time period. These contacts you should be considering for a final re-engagement campaign before deleting them from your database.

Segmenting for long-term inactive contacts

4. Contacts who have never engaged

You should stop sending emails to these contacts. At worst they could be dangerous – bots or spam traps for example – and at best they are genuine contacts who just don’t want to receive emails from you. Give them one chance to re-engage and delete them, or at the very least remove their email opt-in so you reduce your exposure to complaints.

But – you don’t want to include contacts who have signed up on other channels, so as well as using a ‘no response’ criterion, you will also have to specify that they have received at least one email ever:

Segmenting for contacts who have never engaged

5. New registrations

Here you want contacts who have been added to your account in the last 3 months, have received at least one email but have never responded.

Your segment should therefore look like this:

Segmenting for new registrations

And that’s it!

Now you can target each of these cohorts individually, according to how they have interacted with you so far.

Stay tuned for updates on when these segments will either be added you your account or made available straight from the reporting screen.